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5 chapter one Faith, Welfare, and Neoliberalism tax day tea party, 2010 The lead-up to the event was impressive, well funded, and stoked the curiosity of those across the political spectrum. Freedom Works—the generously funded conservative advocacy group—had engineered and mobilized a year’s worth of rage against health-care reform, “big government,” and regulation. Tax Day was meant to be not only the culmination of its efforts but an opportunity to unveil its “Contract from America,” a thinly veiled takeoff of the early 1990s “Contract with America,” which was credited with returning Republicans to congressional power in 1994. The new contract, like the old one, was filled with boilerplate conservative positions on deregulation, lowering taxes, fighting crime, and maintaining a pugnacious posture abroad. Freedom Works and the conservative intelligentsia promised a rally on Tax Day that would number in the tens of thousands, maybe even exceed one hundred thousand. But when April 15 finally arrived, the turnout was disappointingly small, no more than four thousand on the spacious National Mall. What the event lacked in numbers, it made up for in diversity of ideology, on the Right, that is. Though the participants were almost entirely white, the ideological variation expressed through the many placards and signs was an intriguing window onto the multifarious motivations among members of the Right in the United States.1 There were signs that seemed singularly focused on government debt (“your kids are China debt slaves”), those that focused on gun laws (“I’ll keep my guns, freedom, and money . . . you keep the change”), on abortion (“abortion sucks, abort our 44th prez”), the welfare state (“I am an enemy of the welfare state”), and many advocating the perception that the United States was slipping into despotic socialism (“hey Obama, we refuse to trade our Constitution for your Marxist agenda”). There were signs that were meant to personally diminish the president as a person—racist parodies of the president, the president in white 6 • chapter one face, the president’s face imposed on Stalin’s—and of course there were signs that expressed simple rage at the “leftist establishment.” In perhaps the most concise expression of this sort, a white Ford pickup truck circled the rally with the expression “angry mob on board” streaked across its tinted windows. These signs were the focus of media attention, of Facebook parodies, of discussion by cable news pundits. “Rage against out-of-control government” was the prime talking point that emerged from the mainstream analysis. But there were also other fragments of the conservative movement represented on April 15. They received comparatively less press but are of particular interest for this book. First, there were dozens of signs expressing affinity for the work of Ayn Rand. “Who is John Galt?” “Where is John Galt?” and “Please forward this doctor’s mail to Galt’s Gulch”—all references to Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, in which the rich, tired of being taxed and regulated, leave society to form a colony in Galt’s Gulch—were but a few examples of the references to Rand. Second, dozens of signs referenced the Bible in some way. Most were issue oriented—references to the immorality of abortion or gay marriage or to the importance of defending Israel. Others were more general and ominous; one sign simply quoted Hosea 4:6, reading, “Because you have ignored the law of your God” (beneath this verse was a picture of a ship labeled “America” sinking into the sea). Some of these signs tried to fuse biblical morality with libertarian ideals. One sign quoted Proverbs 16:26, “He who labors, labors for himself,” followed by the editorial addition, “not the state” (figure 1.1). These signs—those that attempted to fuse the individualistic, antistatist, procapitalist politics of the Right to Bible-is-inerrant fundamentalism—are particularly curious in the context of both the Tax Day rally and the recent history of the American Right. On the one hand, such a fused sentiment is not so surprising. Ayn Rand has always been a sort of folk hero on the American Right for her strong anticommunist stance, pro-individualist politics, and relatively successful efforts to create a conservative cultural counterbalance to Hollywood and the publishing industry. Her books, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957)—both later adapted into films—were popular during their time and have remained so among conservatives for venerating the individual, markets, and an antipathy for government. Moreover, the Religious Right has been...

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